The lack of action means the Forest Service continues to face the prospect of cannibalizing its budget to fight wildfires while having fewer resources to reduce fire danger in the first place. Negotiators did agree to give the agency more money for the upcoming fire season, but all bets are off after that.

The deal, which also included several forest management changes aimed at increasing timber harvests on federal land, was scuttled in part because of opposition from several environmental groups. Conversely, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska and the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, complained that the deal didn't do enough to allow more logging in the vast Tongass National Forest.

Still, the deal's failure upset Obama administration officials and numerous western lawmakers from both parties who said they came close to a deal.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has been pushing for years to shift funding for combating the nation's most severe fires out of the Forest Service budget, said he would continue his fight next year.

"Fire prevention has always been getting the short end of the stick," Wyden said. "This is a textbook case of inefficiency in federal budgeting."

In 1995, 16 percent of the Forest Service was spent on fighting wildfires. That rose to 52 percent this year - and Congress still had to pony up another $700 million after the summer fire season to pay all of the fire fighting bills.

Wyden and Forest Service officials say the increased spending on wildfires has crowded out money for projects to thin forests, remove brush and take other actions that reduce fire hazards. The problem has also grown worse as a changing climate has led to more drought and a longer fire season.

In Congress, Republicans have led a drive to roll back some environmental rules, saying that more intensive management of the forests will help reduce fire danger.

"Despite lost lives to catastrophic wildfires, hundreds of lost homes, billions of taxpayer dollars spent, and millions of acres of blacked forests, Congress once again failed to pass common sense forest management and fire borrowing reforms," said the group's president, Travis Joseph, in a statement. "After this year's devastating fire season, I don't know what else it's going to take to get Congress to wake up and say: enough is enough, let's fix this."

Several environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, Earthjustice and the Cdnter for Biological Diversity, weighed in against the bill.

That helped spur Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the energy and natural resources committee to play a key role in killing the agreement.

"It was loaded with damaging and bad forest policy," said Randi Spivak, the public lands director for the Center for Biological Diversity. "There was so much desperation to get a bill."

The Forest Service didn't go away empty handed. Congressional negotiators agreed to insert additional money for the agency into a catch-all spending bill expected to pass soon to keep the government running.

The Forest Service would receive another $580 million in the coming year to fight wildfires as well as another $545 million in projects for tree-thinning, brush removal and other projects to reduce fire dangers.

Robert Bonnie, the Agriculture Department undersecretary who oversees the Forest Service, said he appreciated the additional money for next year's fire season.

However, he added, it doesn't solve the Forest Service's long-term problem of not having enough to invest in forest restoration and management because "we're devoting so much more in resources to fire fighting."

Bonnie argued that the management changes were "well-designed" and would particularly ease the way for timber harvests that win the blessing of collaborative groups representing a wide variety of interests.

Murkowski and Cantwell spoke on the Senate floor Wednesday evening to defend their actions to block the deal. Both said they were committed to solving the Forest Service's fire-borrowing problems but raised several doubts about the proposed deal.

Murkowski said she was confident the additional money the spending bill will provide for the Forest Service will take care of the next fire season. Cantwell said she couldn't accept an agreement that called for "simply clear-cutting large swaths of land where we haven't made the right assessments."

Wyden said he was encouraged that he was able to assemble a wide range of bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate this, leaving him optimistic that there is now a broad enough coalition to get the wildfire funding issue fixed next year.

This year's wildfire season cost the Forest Service more than $1.7 billion, a record amount for the agency. It was also a particularly bad year in Oregon, where 631,000 acres of forestlands were burned, with one fire destroying 43 homes near John Day.